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ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence. many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is a meanspiritedness in the political world or, at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling.﻿

“In Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short. Work hard, work passionately, but apply your most precious asset-time-to what is most meaningful to you. What are you willing to do for the rest of your life? That question would be absurd, given the inevitability of change. No, what the question really asks is, if your life were to end suddenly and unexpectedly tomorrow, would you be able to say you’ve been doing what you truly care about today? What would you be willing to do for the rest of you life? What would it take to do it right now? “﻿

In October of last year, I was running engineering for a promising mobile commerce startup that I co-founded in 2011. By many Silicon Valley measures, we were doing well – seed funded, making revenue, ~20 person team, multiple launched products, etc. It was comfortable.

Google SetsGive it two examples, and Google's spreadsheet can make a list of almost anything.

Yesterday +TechCrunch reported that if you make a spreadsheet in Google Drive (Google Docs, formerly), enter and highlight the names of two beers, and pull down on the corner of the spreadsheet cell while holding Option or Control, the app will automatically fill the following cells with the names of other beers. The information is pulled, seemingly, from nowhere.

It doesn't just work for beer, car brands, colors, states, or websites, as reported, but just about any category you can think of. The feature was an outgrowth of a discontinued Google Labs project called Google Sets, so it's no longer pulling real time information.

If you live in the orange areas, you are in what the DHS now considers a "Fourth Amendment Exclusion Zone"...meaning that it's fine for the DHS to stop anyone within 100 miles (the Orange area) of ANY US border, without any suspicion or warrant, and search all the data on all their devices.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” says the executive summary.

EDIT: Ok, so here's the thing. I'm tired of hearing the back and forth of "It's this candidate's fault" or "It's that party's fault." No. It's your fault. It's my fault.

They're using laws that were passed with MASSIVE approval by the American people. When we invaded Afghanistan, it was supported by over 90% of the population. When we passed the Patriot Act and similar legislation after 9/11 (which led to DHS and other agencies being able to enact changes like the above), the support was well over 80%.

We, as Americans, are really good at feeling fear first, and then reasoning about it much, much later. We allowed our leaders to gain this power out of fear, very similar to the "Red Scare", and the eventual conclusion of such a precious gift is an abuse of that power.

If anybody would just pick up and read a damned history book every once and a while, we wouldn't be so awful at letting these things happen.

Your reading list for this evening. Let's try to stop this sort of madness before it gets any worse:

Propoganda (1928) by Edward BernaysThe Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) by Wilhelm ReichThe Human Use of Human Beings (1950) by Norbert WienerCapitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) & A Thousand Plateaus (1980) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix GuattariA People's History of the United States: 1492 – Present (1980_ by Howard Zinn

Supreme Court Hearing on DOMA:"Congress just passes a law which takes about, let's say, 30 percent of the people who are married in the United States and says no tax deduction, no this, no that, no medical — medical benefits, none much these good things, none of them for about 20, 30 percent of all of the married people. Can they do that? [..] What gives the Federal Government the right to be concerned at all at what the definition of marriage is? — you're saying, we can create this special category — men and women. How do you get the Federal Government to have the right to create categories of that type based on an interest that's not there, but based on an interest that belongs to the States?"﻿

"On March 27 2013, DOMA will come before the Supreme Court, and the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all." - Bill Clinton﻿

When I used to review executives, I would tell them: “You are doing a great job at your current job, but the plan says that we will have twice as many employees next year as we have right now. Therefore, you will have a new and very different job and I will have to re-evaluate you on that job.”In giving this kind of direction, it’s important to point out to the executive that when the company doubles in size, she has a new job. This means that doing things that made her successful in her old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the No. 1 way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job.What about being loyal to the team that got you here? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sales people, finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.﻿

As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hi...